The pretty college graduate is now lying in bed, clearly still in considerable pain three days after a doctor sawed through the flesh and bone below her knee to insert what looks an awful lot like knitting needles through the length of her tibiae.

By plotting the lengths of femora, tibiae and metatarsi onto ternary diagrams, Daniel Elvidge and David Unwin found that pterosaurs occupied a tight, compact group of data points within morphospace, and a ‘data cloud’ similar in size to that occupied by bats.

When the os tibiae, having made a wound at the knee, has protruded through the skin, whether the dislocation be outward or inward, in such a case, if the bone be reduced, death will be even more speedy than in the other cases, although speedy also in them.